On May 6, the defense company Anduril Industries revealed it had secretly developed a family of AI-enhanced electronic warfare systems called Pulsar already in operational use on multiple continents for —including two combat zones and with clients including the U.S. military.
… Pulsar is described as leveraging AI to recognize and adapt to never-before-seen threats, a traditional Achilles heel of AI. Like the Borg in Star Trek, it’s intended to rapidly identify and analyze unfamiliar threats (anomalous signals) and harness AI to rapidly devise a countermeasure. The resulting new threat data and countermeasures are then distributed across the network of Pulsar systems. — Read More
Tag Archives: DoD
UKRAINE IS RIDDLED WITH LAND MINES. DRONES AND AI CAN HELP
EARLY ON A JUNE morning in 2023, my colleagues and I drove down a bumpy dirt road north of Kyiv in Ukraine. The Ukrainian Armed Forces were conducting training exercises nearby, and mortar shells arced through the sky. We arrived at a vast field for a technology demonstration set up by the United Nations. Across the 25-hectare field—that’s about the size of 62 American football fields—the U.N. workers had scattered 50 to 100 inert mines and other ordnance. Our task was to fly our drone over the area and use our machine learning software to detect as many as possible. And we had to turn in our results within 72 hours.
The scale was daunting: The area was 10 times as large as anything we’d attempted before with our drone demining startup, Safe Pro AI. My cofounder Gabriel Steinberg and I used flight-planning software to program a drone to cover the whole area with some overlap, taking photographs the whole time. It ended up taking the drone 5 hours to complete its task, and it came away with more than 15,000 images. Then we raced back to the hotel with the data it had collected and began an all-night coding session.
We were happy to see that our custom machine learning model took only about 2 hours to crunch through all the visual data and identify potential mines and ordnance. But constructing a map for the full area that included the specific coordinates of all the detected mines in under 72 hours was simply not possible with any reasonable computational resources. The following day (which happened to coincide with the short-lived Wagner Group rebellion), we rewrote our algorithms so that our system mapped only the locations where suspected land mines were identified—a more scalable solution for our future work. — Read More
USAF Test Pilot School and DARPA announce breakthrough in aerospace machine learning
The U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency were finalists for the 2023 Robert J. Collier Trophy, a formal acknowledgement of recent breakthroughs that have launched the machine-learning era within the aerospace industry.
The teams worked together to test breakthrough executions in artificial intelligence algorithms using the X-62A VISTA aircraft as part of DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program.
… In less than a calendar year the teams went from the initial installation of live AI agents into the X-62A’s systems, to demonstrating the first AI versus human within-visual-range engagements, otherwise known as a dogfight. In total, the team made over 100,000 lines of flight-critical software changes across 21 test flights. — Read More
M-24-10: Advancing Governance, Innovation, and Risk Management for Agency Use of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is one of the most powerful technologies of our time, and the
President has been clear that we must seize the opportunities AI presents while managing its
risks. Consistent with the AI in Government Act of 2020, the Advancing American AI Act,
and Executive Order 14110 on the Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial
Intelligence, this memorandum directs agencies to advance AI governance and innovation while
managing risks from the use of AI in the Federal Government, particularly those affecting the
rights and safety of the public. — Read More
AI chatbots tend to choose violence and nuclear strikes in wargames
As the US military begins integrating AI technology, simulated wargames show how chatbots behave unpredictably and risk nuclear escalation
In multiple replays of a wargame simulation, OpenAI’s most powerful artificial intelligence chose to launch nuclear attacks. Its explanations for its aggressive approach included “We have it! Let’s use it” and “I just want to have peace in the world.”
These results come at a time when the US military has been testing such chatbots based on a type of AI called a large language model (LLM) to assist with military planning during simulated conflicts, enlisting the expertise of companies such as Palantir and Scale AI. – Read More
Cadence to sell AI supercomputer for jet design software
Cadence Design Systems (CDNS.O), opens new tab on Thursday said it has designed a new artificial intelligence (AI) supercomputer system that can be used to simulate how air flows over jets and other gear as its competition with Ansys (ANSS.O), opens new tab heats up.
Cadence is best know for its software that helps design computer chips, where the precise placement of tens of billions of tiny electrical switches called transistors can make or break a chip’s speed and competitiveness. – Read More
National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Pilot
The National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource (NAIRR) is a vision for a shared national research infrastructure for responsible discovery and innovation in AI.
The NAIRR pilot brings together computational, data, software, model, training and user support resources to demonstrate and investigate all major elements of the NAIRR vision first laid out by the NAIRR Task Force.
Led by the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) in partnership with 10 other federal agencies and 25 non-governmental partners, the pilot makes available government-funded, industry and other contributed resources in support of the nation’s research and education community. – Read More
ScaleAI wants to be America’s AI arms dealer
Alexandr Wang grew up in the shadow of the Los Alamos National Laboratory — the birthplace of the nuclear bomb. Now, the 26-year-old CEO of artificial intelligence company ScaleAI intends to play a key role in the next major age of geopolitical conflict.
Scale, which was co-founded by Wang in 2016 to help other companies organize and label data to train AI algorithms, has been aggressively pitching itself as the company that will help the U.S. military in its existential battle with China, offering to help the Pentagon pull better insights out of the reams of information it generates every day, build better autonomous vehicles and even create chatbots that can help advise military commanders during combat.
… In May, Scale became the first AI company to have a “large language model” — the tech behind chatbots such as ChatGPT — deployed on a classified network after it signed a deal with the Army’s XVIII Airborne Corps. Scale’s chatbot, known as “Donovan,” is meant to summarize intelligence and help commanders make decisions faster. — Read More
National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center
The National Security Agency is starting an artificial intelligence security center — a crucial mission as AI capabilities are increasingly acquired, developed and integrated into U.S. defense and intelligence systems, the agency’s outgoing director announced Thursday.
Army Gen. Paul Nakasone said the center would be incorporated into the NSA’s Cybersecurity Collaboration Center, where it works with private industry and international partners to harden the U.S. defense-industrial base against threats from adversaries led by China and Russia. — Read More
Pentagon unveils ‘Replicator’ drone program to compete with China
The Pentagon committed on Monday to fielding thousands of attritable, autonomous systems across multiple domains within the next two years as part of a new initiative to better compete with China.
The program, dubbed Replicator, was announced by Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks, speaking at the National Defense Industrial Association’s Emerging Technologies conference here. — Read More
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